Live from CTIA!

— September 13, 2006

Downtown Los Angeles is to Hollywood what Brooklyn is to Manhattan. Or rather, was, as Brooklyn's cachet has lately skyrocketed. However, now that CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2006 is in its second day in the Downtown Convention Center, and the show's participants and attendees have conferenced and cavorted everywhere from the zooming glass elevators of the '80s-cool Bonaventure Hotel, to within the silver glint of the shimmering Walt Disney Concert Hall, to the model-strewn rooftop of The Standard hotel, hopefully now Downtown, too, is being held in much higher esteem.

Several companies took the opportunity of the show to make large announcements. If you didn't make it to Los Angeles, no worries -- here's a quick rundown to keep you in the know.

Cingular Wireless and Nokia announced that, come late September, Cingular will begin selling the Nokia E62 exclusively in the United States. The Nokia E62 is a "sleek wireless e-mail machine--built specifically for e-mail--that has an unmatched breadth of personal and business e-mail platforms such as Good Mobile Messaging, BlackBerry Connect, Cingular Xpress Mail, Mail from Exchange and Intellisync at the groundbreaking price of $149.99," says Cingular's John Kampfe. Truly a mobile device, the E62 will be supported by the Cingular EDGE-powered ALLOVER data network in the United States, and abroad users can find voice services in 180 countries and data services in 100 countries.

A busy partner, Cingular also teamed with Sierra Wireless on Tuesday, to announce the release of the AirCard 875, a 3G PC Card based on the GSM global wireless standard. It's the first commercially available HSDPA 3.6Mbps network card in the Americas--according to the proud folks at Sierra Wireless--and because it's on the Cingular network, it offers customers the most places worldwide to access data services.

Not one to be left out, Sprint had some PC Card news of its own. Come Q406, it'll be expanding its line of EV-DO Revision A-capable PC Cards, with the addition of the PX-500 by Pantech and the Aircard 595 by Sierra Wireless. Along with the S720 Sprint Mobile Broadband Card by Novatel Wireless, that puts three cards on the Sprint Power Vision Network with download speeds from 400 to 700 Kbps. And after a few updates to coverage areas, expected to start later this year, those numbers will bump to a range of 450 to 850 Kbps.

Aeris, a network operator for wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) fixed and mobile communications services, made a friend of U.S. Cellular, whose network capabilities (the sixth-largest in the U.S.) will extend Aeris' CDMA footprint in the Americas and provide enhanced 1xRTT, SMS and MicroBurst services. Mark Chiarelli, senior VP of Networks for Aeris, remarked: "Aeris' North American M2M deployments in the automotive, fleet management, trucking and security industries will directly benefit from this expansion."

And hardly last or least, Bango and Yahoo! announced they're teaming up to offer mobile billing capabilities, as well as a mobile presence, to businesses of all sizes. The billing comes courtesy of Bango, and Yahoo! makes it possible to create mobile search advertising campaigns. Using Bango's online mobile platform, companies can then track the performance of their Yahoo! mobile search campaigns, gaining powerful business intelligence.

This sampling of announcements is just a small portion of the news coming out of CTIA. For even more information, as well as podcasts, videos and pictures from the show, visit www.CTIA.org.

Enjoy!

P.S.: Whether you're at the show or visiting CTIA online, we highly recommend you check out the Mobile Solutions Guide, the official magazine of the event, created by Mobile Enterprise in conjunction with CTIA. Not only is it full of information to help you fully taking advantage of the show's offerings, but it features real-world case studies from a number of verticals, and all of them proving the difference that mobility can make

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